Newsletter

Winter 2003

Stewardship in Britain

Cal DeWitt, Director of Au Sable Institute, presented the keynote address to the Ecological Ethics session of the British Ecological Society at its annual meeting in York, England in December.

He was invited to address the Society on the topic of Environmental Stewardship, the theme around which Au Sable Institute is based.  His talk focused on science, ethics and praxis as the framework for doing environmental stewardship.

Science asks the question, “How does the world work?” Ethics asks, “What ought to be?” And praxis asks the question, “Then what must we do?” DeWitt said.

All three questions must be kept together, which each one informing the others, DeWitt explained.  Knowing how the world works without putting this knowledge into practice serves no good.  Knowing what ought to be without understanding how things work can get us into trouble. And just doing something without caring what ought to be or how the world works is a slippery slope of ungrounded activism.

Stewardship of the most robust kind is responding to dynamic and ever-changing conditions in meeting the challenge of keeping and restoring the integrity of the landscape and ecosystems, even as human needs are being met, said DeWitt.  And the reach of robust stewardship must extend to as far as the effects of human beings are felt throughout the biosphere.  This includes concern and action from local land and soils, to Earth’s climate system.

It was the second time in a year that DeWitt has spoken in the United Kingdom.  The first was in July when Au Sable Institute and the John Ray Initiative of the UK sponsored a forum on climate change (Forum 2002).

More than 1,000 ecological scientists attended the meeting of the British Ecological Society.